An Audience Of One

August 1, 2008 on 4:00 pm | In Advertising, Blogs | 2 Comments

Most blogs have an audience of one: the author. So, you need to understand the landscape if you are going to build a blog audience. Did you know that there are nearly 113 million blogs being tracked by Technorati with an average of 175,000 new ones coming online daily. That’s 18 updates per second and 1.6 million daily posts. Wow, that’s a lot of competition for the blog-reader’s attention.

With all this competition how do you break out of the pack? There are many ways to build an audience and we’ll be talking about that here in the next few weeks. Let’s start with a few basics that I think every blogger should do.

- Select a topic. First, let’s review what is popular. The top blogs tend to fall into one of these categories: sports, news, politics, technology, humor and celebrity coverage. The top 250 tags according to Blog Flux include politics, news, music, travel, art, technology, marketing and business. Seeing a pattern? Now, if you are a world-class expert in any of these topics, maybe you can become one of the top blogs. Or, maybe you dig deeper and look for neglected topics for your blog.

- Set objectives. What is it you want to accomplish with your blog? Is it a corporate blog aimed at providing an open channel with customers, or is it a highly personal blog that allows the exposure of the “real” you? Different approaches that require specific approaches to audience-building and promotion. Do you want to build a mass communication blog, or do you want a small, fiercely loyal audience?

- Define your audience. Are you talking to all carbon-based lifeforms? Please don’t. Narrow down your audience. What do you know about them from demographic and psychographic perspectives? Are you addressing multiple audiences? If so, do you need to segment your audiences and develop emails with different messages? How will each audience profit from our communications.

OK, that’s enough from me. What thoughts do you have on the subject?

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  • http://www.cindystephenson.wordpress.com Cindy Stephenson

    I started my blog in May of this year, and have a lot of respect for people who can churn out content with ease.

    I tend to think it would be easier to partner with two other individuals on a blog. Not only would it help share the load, it would add variety, and help expand readership, since everyone would have different contacts.

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